Monisha Ravisetti
Reporter, Life Sciences and Physical Sciences
@monisharavisMonisha Ravisetti, based in New York, covers Life Sciences and Physical Sciences for The Academic Times. Prior to that, Monisha worked at Weill Cornell Medical College, Mount Sinai West and NYU Langone conducting clinical and basic science research. She graduated with a degree focused in philosophy, physics and chemistry from New York University, and her work investigates the intersection between science and the human condition.
Consistently ranked as one of the leading causes of death around the world, malaria doesn’t have an effective vaccine yet. But researchers have invented a promising new blueprint for one — with properties akin to the novel RNA-based vaccine for COVID-19.
Among the youngest of its kind, a new dinosaur dubbed Dzharatitanis kingi was unearthed by U.S. and Russian researchers in Asia, and the fossil's location provides insight into how Earth’s continents were bridged and populated several million years ago.
In collaboration with NASA, the German Aerospace Center has discovered that some valuable microbes found on Earth — including one that's highly important for industrial and pharmaceutical purposes — can temporarily exist on Mars, a conclusion drawn from their recent experiment MARSBOx, or rather, Mars in a box, that has timely implications for space exploration.
Thanks to technological advances, massive amounts of biological information are now at scientists' disposal, but because they lack the tools to compute such large data networks, it often goes unanalyzed. However, researchers say they’ve found a way to decode one such system — the neural network — by using a new model to locate the brain's so-called edge of chaos.
Dogs appear to express body awareness, which is fundamental to understanding one's own conscious existence, and the researchers behind the novel finding suggest this physical perception could point to the animal's capacity for other advanced forms of thought, too.
Although 60% of Earth’s nearly 6,000 satellites are non-operational and needlessly occupying the planet's orbit, attempts to remove this "space junk" are sparse. But a Russian physicist has been fine-tuning a method to eliminate defunct satellites — using space-borne lasers to melt them into plasma — to ensure it won't inadvertently create even more debris.
Many COVID-19 survivors experience symptoms even months after they recover, and while the medical reasoning for this phenomenon continues to elude scientists, a Malaysian neurobiology researcher has proposed a novel hypothesis: The virus could be causing chronic brainstem dysfunction.
In a 49-page study, nearly three dozen experts assembled by The Lancet concluded that U.S. health policies under the Trump administration resulted in an avoidable 461,000 deaths per year — plus an unnecessary four in 10 COVID-19-related deaths — blaming decades of policy failures that were significantly enhanced by the 45th president.
Sawfish have lost 59% of their historical distribution and are heading toward complete extinction due to overfishing, a new study says, posing a threat to ocean biodiversity and indicating that policies worldwide to protect the world's largest ray are not being enforced.
Approximately 4.6 million U.S. adults have a peanut allergy, a new study shows, but only about half have an epinephrine prescription, suggesting diagnosed adults should be more actively educated on how to manage the condition beyond merely removing peanuts from their diet.
People with dementia are at a significantly higher risk of contracting COVID-19 and experiencing more severe outcomes of the disease, including death, regardless of other factors, according to a study published in Alzheimer's & Dementia on Tuesday.
An Iowa State University astrophysicist led the first successful 3D simulations that demonstrate the formation of planetesimals through dust particle build-up catalyzed by pressure bumps, possibly confirming a long-standing theory of how larger planets, including those in our solar system, came to be.